Category Archives: Ecological Reproduction

In a previous post, I gave two cheers for “reproduction” as a useful verb to think with when trying to understand the relationship between “political economy” and the social-ecological world within LPE. I held back that third cheer out of a rhetorical concern. As I put it then, “‘Social reproduction’” might imply that there is a pre-existing social world, that it ‘reproduces’ in some unspecified way, and that the whole process is ancillary to the topic of Political Economy.” In this post, I return to that unease in a more theoretical key. One weakness of “reproduction” as a word to describe social and ecological dynamics is, I think, in the way it suggests long-term sameness, whether through duplication or equilibrium. A second weakness of “reproduction” is its failure to mark the processes of destruction and waste those dynamics involve. To compensate for these weaknesses, I want to offer a supplemental keyword for analyzing the social and ecological world: “extraction.” Like reproduction, “extraction” has a Marxist pedigree, but it also carries at least four connotations that “reproduction” doesn’t. The first is non-renewability; the second is corruption; the third is waste; and the fourth is violence. The examples that follow illustrate these connotations at the level of national economies; there are many other levels of scale on which the implications of “extraction” might usefully be explored.

As I argued in Part I of this post, we need to rethink not only the scope of state intervention in the economy, but what exactly the economy is. Instead of focusing on the industrial manufacturing “inside” the economy and trying to clean up the externalities that inevitably spill out, we need an economic policy that takes seriously the social and ecological functions that have been treated as external to the economy altogether. That is to say—we can no longer think of things like social and ecological wellbeing as “post-material” concerns or something to address as a “justice” bonus after we’ve gotten the economy growing again. Rather, these things are fundamental to how the economy works. So how far does “industrial policy” extend, and what would it mean with respect to social reproduction and ecological reproduction, from care work to carbon sequestration? And what in turn does this mean for the future of state action?

Climate discourse frequently moves almost seamlessly between the language of the “Green New Deal” and the call for “wartime mobilization.” World War II, this argument goes, is an example of undertaking rapid economic transformation in the face of emergency. As Bill McKibben writes, “Turning out more solar panels and wind turbines may not sound like warfare, but it’s exactly what won World War II: not just massive invasions and pitched tank battles and ferocious aerial bombardments, but the wholesale industrial retooling that was needed to build weapons and supply troops on a previously unprecedented scale.” To move away from fossil fuels, we need to “build a hell of a lot of factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses.” We do need to build a lot of solar panels and other clean energy technologies. But that’s a short-term transition strategy—not a model for a new economy. After the war, the expanded productive capacity was redeployed again, towards mass production of consumer goods for the benefit of private capital, with serious environmental consequences. But the emphasis on building factories also fits uneasily with the New Deal analogy.

For the three decades that climate change has been a political issue, it has been understood primarily as an instance of severe “market failure”: as the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change explains, “greenhouse gas emissions are externalities and represent the biggest market failure the world has seen.” In other words, carbon emissions do not have a direct price, meaning that emissions send no market signals and are not included in economic decision-making. The most prominent solutions to climate change have followed this model, recommending a carbon tax or other economic measures by which to “internalize the externality” of greenhouse gas emissions—to account for the social and environmental costs of carbon. Pricing carbon is supposed to make fossil fuels more expensive, ostensibly creating incentives for innovation in clean energy and other green technologies, and in turn prompting a shift towards their use.

In this first of two posts, I’ll explain how this model developed, and what kind of intervention the Green New Deal represents. In short, the scale of transformation called for implies a far more robust role for the state, going beyond mere market corrections to more substantial intervention in the economy. I’m not convinced, however, that the current framing of the Green New Deal is steeped in a vision of the old economy, and doesn’t address necessary support for social and ecological reproduction. (I’ll elaborate that critique in my second post.)

The ‘Green New Deal’ exceeds in scale and scope all major undertakings of U.S. federal, state, and local governments since both its namesake – Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal – and the mobilization effort for the Second World War in 1940s, respectively. And this is true irrespective of what measure of ‘size’ you might use – geographic and cross-sectoral scope, number of firms and sub-federal units of government apt to be playing a role, segments of the population who will be playing a role, dollar value of real expenditure, dollar value of expenditure as a percentage of GDP, … you name it.

Against such a backdrop, we do well to recognize that in the present case, ‘size matters’ – and matters in a way that the politically demoralized, the fiscally austere, and tepid allies alike seem to miss. The problems the Green New Deal addresses, in short, are problems where bigger is better, is imperative, and is, paradoxically, more politically feasible and ‘affordable’ too where responding is concerned.

In the LPE community, issues of race, class, sexuality, and environment are sometimes referred to collectively as “social and ecological reproduction.” In this post and others to follow, I want to think about the place of the social and the ecological in “law and political economy.”

As others have written on this blog, one of LPE’s central commitments is the idea that economic and political governance are both constituted through legal rules, reasoning, and institutions. A second commitment is that in a democratically constituted society, economic governance ought not to be treated like a fully autonomous machine, but rather as bound to some extent by political norms. These ideas, of course, are not new (even to legal scholarship, which tends to be a late adopter of new ideas). But they have new force today. As the late Erik Olin Wright observed in a paper on “strategic logics of anti-capitalism,” in the early decades following World War II (the “Golden Age of Capitalism”), federal government policy worked to ameliorate the most damaging effects of capitalism in at least three ways: reducing the exposure of households to catastrophic risk through social insurance; heavily subsidizing public goods such as libraries, education, transportation, parks, and basic science research and development; and creating a regulatory regime to address some of the most devastating “negative externalities” caused by corporate capital, including environmental degradation, predatory market behavior, and workplace exploitation. The reversal of all of these policies, here in the United States and elsewhere in the world, goes under the name “neoliberalism.” And “law and political economy” is critical legal scholarship reinvented for the age of neoliberalism.

What, though, does LPE want? Would rolling back neoliberalism lead us to pack away our laptops and go home? Take, for example, some infamous features of the “Golden Age:” the omission of agricultural and domestic workers from the Fair Labor Standards Act, the endorsement of “redlining” by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the embrace of gendered labor markets, and the failure of the federal government to provide free child care (let alone abortion and contraception). Stirring as FDR’s “four freedoms” speech continues to be, I wouldn’t want to live in 1941. We need to do more than un-install the neoliberalism app; we need to change out the operating system, and that operating system runs on caste.